


Whistle With Me

by oh_cripe_my_fish



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: 1700s, Adventure, Angst, Character Death, F/M, FrUK, Human AU, Human pirate AU, Humour, M/M, Multi, Romance, idek the genre depends on what mood I'm in, swashbuckling madness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-06 22:57:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20299318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oh_cripe_my_fish/pseuds/oh_cripe_my_fish
Summary: As word spreads that the notoriously ruthless Captain Kirkland has begrudgingly set aside his oozing, aching, seething hatred to ally himself with the mystifying Captain Bonnefoy, it's all the confirmation any seaman needs to know that Captain Fernandez-Carriedo is a sinister force to be reckoned with. Will Arthur and Francis find salvation and victory with each other before Antonio can damn them both?





	Whistle With Me

**Author's Note:**

> I do that thing where I refer to all ships as 'she'.

**October, 1702**

The sky was dark and smouldering, lightning sparking between the hollows of the blackening clouds. The sea angered at their existence as rain fell on them from the heavens like a divine punishment.

Matthew blinked water from his wide, trepid eyes and clutched the crucifix dangling from the folds of his shirt, clinging tighter to the rigging despite the sores on his hands as the impressive ship careened onward dauntlessly, splitting water with her hulking bow as she smashed through the towering swells. Scraping soggy, lengthening hair from his eyes, his anxious gaze followed his many crew mates line of sight, toward the dark horizon on which a speck had been steadily lingering during the last few hours of their tireless sailing. Whatever it was, _whoever _it was, was relentless in their hunt and had the entire crew around Matthew restless and attentive, foretelling and formulating, counting their bullets, fastening their swords to their artillery belts, stuffing the cannons below deck with gunpowder and balls despite no orders being given and the portholes remaining closed. As a novice sailor who had never wanted to join the crew of any ship, never mind the crew of a pirate ship, he didn’t know the ins and outs of every seafarer’s fable, but he knew enough about the ship he was currently aboard to know that their tailgater could only bring them woe.

La Maîtresse Jalouse - to board her was to tempt, even taunt, death, they say.

With her fair share of foes, ranging from petty grudges to seething hatred, the Jealous Mistress was the forefront of many tales, as Matthew had quickly discovered while visiting port after port, trying to gather information on the whereabouts of the flighty ship. Some seamen were as infatuated with storytelling as they were with the sea and had poeticized her in many ways –the ship that never docked, a fatal attraction, _“and when you lay eyes on her for the first time, no woman will ever compare” _one drunken, enamoured man had said. That guy had been full of shit, but Matthew understood at least some of his sentiment as he climbed the Jealous Mistress’ gangway for the first time, eyes absorbing the sight of her exterior; gleaming with varnish, smoothed to perfection. At the forefront was her bowsprit, comprising of an angry and weeping woman of brass wielding a sword and a man’s head, painstakingly crafted and mounted. Men had told him the Mistress was originally built to lead one of the largest French naval fleets, that she was a personal favourite of the king of France. From her exterior alone, there was no doubting that she was made with royalty in mind. Speculation was she was _the_ ship to sail through an entire British convoy to pillage the spoils meant for the king of England - priceless jewels meant to embellish the crown, a bartender had told him before asking what Matthew’s business was asking.

Her captain was rumoured to be a contradiction, charmingly pleasant, if not a little bit of an indecorous drunkard, to something bordering raving mad, depending on who Matthew spoke to. The pirate that shouldn’t be, supposedly, and Lady Luck’s infatuation to have lived as long as he had. Matthew took everything with a pinch of salt. His twin brother had once told him mariners wove elaborate stories to pass the time and keep them sane on long voyages, it helped them marginally function among the scurvy and starvation.

Not all of the Mistress and her captain’s infamy was their own doing, however. A staggering amount of it was because of another entirely different entity - a menacing shadow that was as notorious as Davy Jones was famed and the Kraken was fabled. Only the bravest fools dared talk about the shadow in any great depth at any one time. Her shadow was of a ship so feared that some men who had encountered the shadow could only say her name over enough ales, ghosts and demons in their bleary eyes. Superstitious men believed that even breathing the ship’s name would lure her to their ports to leave it behind as flaming remains, a blaze so high it would warn oncoming ships for miles that she was in their waters, hungry, hunting, preying.

They had been followed before - followed plenty during the past few weeks, both in broad daylight and the darkn of night, by naval and purloined vessels alike, but the sea air had never felt as ominous and stifling and _cold_ as it did now.

Another fork of lightning lit the horizon as the Jealous Mistress plunged into a trough between swells. A crewman named Dupuis who had been trafficked into piracy by his father - and was one of Matthew’s few familiars on this ship - rolled past Matthew with some loud, blunt curses. There was a cry elsewhere behind Matthew as a man was thrown over the forecastle parapets into the fitful sea around them.

The intimating, herculean bald quartermaster stomped on Dupuis’ arm to stop him sliding onward. “Inept bastards are flogged!" he barks. "You have two fucking legs, I know men with none who sail better than you!” Dupuis rapidly blinks rainwater form his eyes and coughs more rainwater from his mouth. 

Before the quartermaster releases Dupuis to scramble to his feet, slipping and sliding, a delighted voice called out to the quartermaster over the howling wind.

“You should have let him slide on!”

Matthew started and quickly turned to stare in the direction of the grandiloquent voice that was in stark contrast to the complete chaos around him. 

As Captain Bonnefoy stepped down from the final step onto the main deck with a flourish, Matthew hurriedly returned to heaving the rope at his side of the sail, jaw tight as he dealt with the pain of the torn muscle in his back. If he worked hard enough, he hoped the captain’s attention wouldn’t be drawn to him for the wrong reasons.

“He would've been washed overboard! We can’t afford to loose anymore men to these waters, they’re needed to take bullets is that ship catches us!” The quartermaster explained his debatable act of heroism with a rumble in his throat, lifting his foot from Dupuis’ arm just as the ship hit another incline. Sea spray rained the deck and a gush of seawater washed Dupuis in the opposite direction, the poor man colliding with the base of one of the masts with a shout. The captain laughed loudly - at what, Matthew wasn’t sure - with blithe glee in his eyes.

“I know, my dear Raphael,” Captain Francis Bonnefoy strode past, smile inane and a few centimetres short of reasonable, patting the towering quartermaster’s rippling bare chest peeking out from his leather coat, which he also eyes up in interest. “But Dupuis is so hopeless I find his blundering and bumbling hilarious, and the fright in his eyes, like a startled deer! Now,” The captain extended a gloved hand of black lace, yanked Dupuis to his feet and whirled on his heel, clasping his hands together, gaiety in his eyes as he quickly gave Dupuis a once over, almost as if to quickly check his well-being. “Does anyone down here have strong molars? Or hold an indifference to the state of their teeth? Or is eager to wreck their horrid teeth even more?” confusion swept across the deck as Francis turned and peered around through the rain battering them. “No? Any knives? The cork in this bottle of wine _will not budge_-” he continued as he pulled a slender bottle from the black lining of his eye-catching turquoise overcoat with gold threading and solid gold buttons.

“Francis, _please,_” Another man cried out, dressed regally in seaweed green in comparison to the rest of the crew. His pale complexion was a tad on the sickly side, amplified when contrasted with the darkest of long brown hair sticking to the curve of his cheekbones. He hurried - almost tumbled - down the stairs from the quarterdeck, hot on the Captain’s heels. The man staggered from side to side as the ship jostled him about, “I’m begging you,” he continued, panting. “Give up on the damned wine and _focus_! What now? That ship behind us, if that’s-”

“Hush,” Francis clicked his tongue, shoved the bottle into the hands of Leon, his brilliant navigator who was almost always gripped in the clutches of hysteria. Pressing a finger to the navigator’s lips, Francis grinned. “This is meant _for you_. Drink yourself into a stupor and relax, drink enough that you’ll sleep through any prospective canon fire. You’re _so tense_-”

_“Francis-!” _the navigator tried again.

_“If,” _Francis interrupted, roguish smile brightening and widening at his Navigator’s frustration through the stream of water pouring off the massive brim of fancy gold-trimmed hat. The fine hair of the peacock feathers adorning the ornate hat had split and what should’ve be white and fluffy ostrich feathers were long sopping with water. “_If _it is who I think it is, which it very likely is, because isn’t it always in such bad weather as this? Aside from the times it actually isn’t, that is when it can be_-”_

_“_For God's sake,_ _for our sake_, focus!_ Or I’m throwing myself overboard!_” _Leon threatened in manic exasperation. 

_“_Feel free,” Francis encouraged with a passive flick of his wrist, pushing past his navigator with the devilish joy remaining on his face as he sauntered toward the centre of the ship. “What was I saying? Ah yes, if it’s _her_,” he continued to smile at all the troubled eyes tracking him, despite his eerie emphasis on ‘her’ that Matthew noticed made some crewmen shift and shiver. “I say, or suggest, or order – or whatever you fancy to interpret this piece of advice as - we do as we always do.”

“That could be any number of things.” Quartermaster Raphael chipped in, voice like gravel and as deep as a deep-sea trench. “Fight, run away, drink ourselves to the death, shoot ourselves, help each other out by shooting each other. Maybe we should gag and bind you, toss you onto the bastard’s ship because you’re the one he really fucking wants-”

“I meant _be pragmatic_ Raphael,” Francis bemoaned, squinting at his quartermaster. “But thank you for your many, many bright ideas. In the meantime, until we are certain it’s our _beloved_,” Francis shrugged nonchalantly as he continued his dreadful attempt to comfort and rally his cagey crew, snatching a loose rope and tossing it into the palms of the nearest man. “I don’t know- how about we all hoist a sail or two, adjust the rigging, _do_! To work! If we please the Mistress, treat her well, she will not let us down!” Francis hollered over the deafening wind and beamed as bright as the lightning that blinded them. He ran a hand wrapped in black lace, also littered in glittering silver and gold rings of opals, sapphires and the darkest of red garnets across the mainmast lovingly before hauling himself onto a ratlines. “To work, keep the distance! If we cannot outrun that ship, then no one can! Dump the spare barrels, the cashmere, leather, tobacco, anything that we do not immediately need! Let the wind carry us!”

The crew livened up again, anyone previously idle now frantically searching out jobs. Matthew livened too, heaving and hauling himself up and over lattices with a clenched jaw, then pushing, shoving, slipping and sliding as he helped his fellow seamen toss spare barrels of whiskey and wine overboard. Yet no matter how much loot they abandoned, the ship tailing them remained. With a pounding heart, Matthew worries his lip as a fellow crewman swore it was getting closer.

“It’s her, Captain!” the barrelman stationed in the crow’s nest roared out over the ship. “It’s the Restless Reaper! I can make out her colours!” The howling of the wind didn’t muffle the frenzy in his voice in the slightest.

Matthew thought it was impossible to feel any colder than he already was, but as his pluming breath was shredded before his eyes by the lashing rain, a shiver - intensified with adrenaline - rippled through him, much more profound than the shivering that caused his teeth to chatter. As his heart sunk with terror, he was suddenly hyperaware of the cross resting against his skin. The cold metal against his skin suddenly stung. Despite his prayers, the lord wouldn’t deliver him to safety, not when he’d chosen this path himself.

If truth be told, it was the Reaper that drove Matthew into piracy in the first place. He’d suspected it was her all along - the Mistress and the Reaper were as entangled as two newlyweds consummating their marriage - and he had wanted her to appear after all these weeks waiting, yet something about hearing the confirmation aloud drained the life and energy from him. Was this what waiting on the gallows felt like?

“Well,” Dupuis said chipperly to the right of him. “Looks like I’m fashioning myself a noose. Pass me that rope,” Matthew glanced his way and swallowed, not exactly comforted that Dupuis felt similarly to him. He looked down at the knotted course rope in his palms.

Many eyes turned towards the captain for guidance once more. Leaving steering to his first mate, Francis hadn’t long been scheming with his Navigator who was hovering close by his elbow, the two resigning themselves to sharing the bottle of wine between them. Leon suddenly looked ill at the confirmation and wretched a few times with his nerves. Francis straightened up, complaining exasperatedly about how the wine that failed to help Leon’s nausea-inducing anxiety as he patted and rubbed the man’s back for a brief few seconds.

“Magnificent,” Francis said, kicking off wooden parapets with a new focus finding his face, hand resting the on the handle of his sheathed sword. “Ready the cannons!” he shouted, addressing his crew collectively. “But do not open the port holes and position them until I give the word!” he continued to bellow, leaning over the parapets to eye the ever-growing shadow behind them with a furrowed brow. “Captain Kirkland would be ambitious to attempt canon fire in these swells! We can only float if we keep the water outside!”

Francis approached as if to breeze past Matthew and a few other men. However, the novice stood, stunned, as the Captain suddenly discarded the bottle containing the last dribble of wine into Matthew’s hands, pausing for a moment to watch Matthew from the corner of his startlingly blue and piercing eyes.

Captain Bonnefoy wasn’t a particularly imposing man. Unusually ostentatious for a pirate, he bundled himself in colourful and embroidered coats and frills, tended to his hair, wore heels resembling some sort of French nobleman that seemed impractical for a varnished and watery deck of a ship on a turbulent sea. He appeared to bathe. It was an odd sight, even when he wasn’t so starkly contrasted with his crew. The captain’s appearance alone attributed to one of the reasons why he was the pirate shouldn’t be - lacking the grit of a pirate, the plainness of a mariner, the uniform of a navel man, in addition to an eccentricity more suited to the performing arts than acts of piracy.

Yet as Matthew wiped rainwater from his brow and held the man’s gaze with a shaky breath, there was a in indeterminate spark in the other’s eye that suggested that perhaps there was a reason for the ambivalence in the stories. Matthew wondered as Francis stared, because men who encountered the Reaper tended to lose their functionality, loose touch with their sanity, become a shadow of who they used to be.

“I don’t know what you’re doing aboard a ship like mine, Williams,” Francis said, and Matthew’s eyes widened at the use of his mother’s maiden name. When he’d been brought aboard by some of the Captain’s crew, he hadn’t shared his last name with anyone, used an alias instead, even when speaking with Dupuis, the closest thing to a friend he had aboard. He still hadn’t used his real name weeks into the voyage. Matthew’s heart palpitated at the dubious glint in the Captain’s eyes, as if he knows more about him than just his mother’s maiden name. “But if you truly mean to attest your allegiance, then you’re going to need a better sword if you plan to make it to sunrise. Go to holding, see what you can find among the plunder.” The Captain orders.

“Yes, Captain!” Matthew replies hurriedly, fighting the part of him that wanted to shrink in on himself. He nodded and hurried on, resisting the urge to hang his head low – a reaction he often had as a timid child and teenager when in confrontational circumstances. 

Francis watched him go for a split second then sauntered on, walked the length of his ship, climbed each flight of stairs until he stood at the very back of the Mistress’ wide bow, looking over the temperamental sea behind him from the poop deck. Peeling his gloves from his palms, he ran his hands over her warm-wooded timber parapets, gentle fingers feeling her groves, committing her texture to memory once again, fearing it would be his last chance to do so. He thought of the others he still loved so dearly but had lost to the Reaper’s wrath and fire. The wooden feather fashioned from a splintered nib of the helm of the Hummingbird, his first, that he wore around his neck. The peculiar red garnet ring he wore in honour of the Garish Garnet, his second. He lifted his eyes from the wood, looked out across the sea at the distant bow of the Restless Reaper, sailing with a black and white union flag for sails, a mockery of her Captain’s old colours, body made of the darkest of ebonies. When the ship gets close enough, Francis doesn’t doubt they’ll be close to look into the headless hood of the Reaper’s figurehead and see each iron bone of the skeletal hand clasping the scythe – Grim himself.

With a telescope on a clear day, he might even see into see the inflamed green eyes of her captain, burning, smoking, like evergreen forests set aflame, conveying inconceivable destruction, unable to be contained.

Her captain, perhaps Francis' biggest regret of all.

“Arthur, my bitter, beastly-browed beauty,” Francis murmured between rumbles of thunder in the distance. The melancholy in Francis’ blue eyes of ships past slowly disintegrated into a boiling sea of nervous excitation. He clasped at the loose white fabric of his shirt under his overcoat long weighted with water, feeling the quick rise and fall of his chest under his knuckles, “You never fail to make my heart _pound_ for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is so long and nothing much happens, I hope it isn’t boring. I tried cutting it down and well… I’m not very good at that.  
iThis was mostly an expository chapter. Chapter 2 with Arthur will hopefully be less of a trainwreck lol. 
> 
> Anyway, here's another FrUk pirate AU you all probably don't need, thank you so much for reading!


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